If the standards applied by Germany and Austria were to be applied in U.S., most of our own elections would have to be overturned. In most instances, our own election officials could not refute the "possibility" that the machine counts had been manipulated.
JB: Too true. Over the years, there have been documentaries, books, articles, massive purges of legal voters and other means of voter suppression, as well as hacks into voter databases and voting machines. Yet, somehow, the average person is blithely confident that all is well with the mechanics of our elections. Where does that leave us?
EC: Excellent question, Joan.
At present, there's a much better prospect for remedies to voter suppression than there is with respect to electronic voting. The principal difference entails visibility.
A growing number of Americans have come to understand, for example, that the spate of GOP-sponsored Photo ID laws have absolutely nothing to do with preventing "voter fraud." As revealed by a 2014 study, over a 14-year period, there were only 31 cases of in-person voter impersonation--the only type of voter fraud that can be prevented by polling place Photo ID restrictions--out of more than one billion votes cast since 2000. Yet, in Texas, for example, a Photo ID law served to disenfranchise more than 600,000 disproportionately minority and poor, lawfully registered voters in the last three Lone Star State elections.
While there are significant legal and political hurdles to ending these forms of voter suppression, e.g. the Supreme Court's gutting of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, there's widespread recognition throughout the entire Democratic Party that Photo ID laws are intended to disenfranchise those demographic communities, especially people of color, who are unlikely to vote for Republican candidates. And the legal damage wrought by the Court both with respect to the Voting Rights Act and the flood of corporate money in politics enabled by the Citizens United decision could be rectified by the next appointment of a Supreme Court Justice if the Democrats were to prevail in November.
The same cannot be said with respect to the dangers posed to democracy by e-voting systems, where the economic impetus amongst e-voting manufacturers and vendors to ignore computer science are analogous to those of a fossil fuel industry that would have our citizenry ignore the dire warnings posed by climate scientists.
Election integrity gained some traction during the years of the George W. Bush presidency, especially after stories emerged about how events in Ohio in 2004 resembled those that occurred in Mexico in 1988. There was evidence that county level vote tabulation had been diverted to a Republican-controlled computer server in Chattanooga, TN in what may have amounted to a "man-in-the-middle" attack. (See this link).
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